I would build large--in fine embossed vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader's feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls.

That precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of the book, is the old note that most touches me: it testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my provision for the reader's amusement.

I felt, in view of the possible limitations of my subject, that no such provision could be excessive, and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that earnest quest.

And I find indeed that this is the only account I can give myself of the evolution of the fable it is all under the head thus named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the right complications as having started.

It was naturally of the essence that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary--or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned.
It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending, conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as the rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a "pyrotechnic display," would be employable to attest that she was.